Galaga, Namco, 1981

Evil comes from above

The shooter Galaga is a successor of Galaxian. The player's spaceship moves from left to right at the bottom of the screen. Just like in Space Invaders, evil comes from above: the extraterrestrial spaceships enter the playing field from both sides, linger, and plummet towards the player's ship. Every now and then an evil ship fires a laser beam. If the player steers his ship into this ray, his ship is lifted upwards. If the player subsequently wins back his or her ship, his fire capacity doubles.

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Galaga arcade model - Galaga is a fixed shooter arcade game developed and published by Namco in Japan and published by Midway in North America in 1981. It is the sequel to Galaxian, released in 1979. Picture source: videogameobsession.com

Apart from the coin-op version, Galaga was released for nine different consoles. The game is also featured in the Namco museum series, alongside games like Ms. Pac-Man.